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I have switched the browser defaults many times over the past month between IE and Chrome. It doesn’t change what happens. And it doesn’t change the fact (when CHROME is the default) that embedded links seem to go almost always to IE and hang.

After much fiddling, I still cannot get most embedded addresses to work. What does work is clicking on the address which then usually opens IE9, which then hangs and never displays a page or displays one page which is frozen on screen. But I can then copy the actual address and PASTE & GO into Chrome which them works fine. Go figure. Any ideas, folks?

Nice to know when one is not alone in the cyberwilderness.

Dumped everything from IE9’s temporary Internet history, etc. Closed IE9. Rebooted. Went back to e-mail and clicked on the link “This thead is located at:” It took 2 minutes 20 seconds to bring up IE9 (which comes almost instantly when directly invoked) and then took another 3 minutes 5 seconds to render the first page. But, if I copy the link and put into either Chrome or IE9 by paste, it takes less than 4 seconds.

1) in slick mode, IE works fast— but only from pasted addresses. It appears to be still hung up when trying from a link.
2) TIH?

Some more information.
It appears that the sloooowdown is related to the use of links. If I click on a link, the browsers are horribly slow or ineffective. But if I click and then copy the address and enter it in either a different browser or the SAME browser, every goes back to normal hyperspeed. What could be happening?

That may nail it. My reserved partiton is 32% free.

How can I check to confirm what partition scheme I have?

Meanwhile, where the head meets the platter, I was able to image my two ailing drives (one the boot drive) to two new HDDs of a larger sizes. Using Norton for XP (back when Norton was Norton & meant something).

Interesting thread. I must say, I’ve been in PCs since 1983 (IBM PC with two FULL height floppy drives and 16 K on the motherboard). No HDD. But it makes me a bit queasy to remove a reserved system partition in order to get a backup to work. I also think that Windows is better and better (since v3.4) but MS does make mistakes. Putting out a backup scheme with the kind of flaw I’ve found and having exactly zero corporate support is, well, another four letter word.

I’m getting my head around this issue in pretty much the same terms. Since posting I have continued to search the ‘net and I am amazed at the number of others who have fetched up on this issue. 0x33000081 is a four letter word, or equivalent. In my backup programs I have always looked for “bullet proof” — otherwise why back up? It is beginning to look like MS has foisted an iffy proposition on us. Sad. Or maybe I was smart to put off imaging?

I have been a very careful back-up person, remember backing up to casettes of tape on a PC? But I’ve never done an image. Last week I figured I would use the Win7 Pro Backup + image and see how it works. That has taken me on a trip down Alice’s rabbit hole!
I tried to back up to a clean, formatted 2T external drive. After 10 hours (32 bit machine) or so I got a jolt — Win7 couldn’t complete the backup + image. I found error 0x81000033. Horribly written, probably in sub-continent English, saying that there isn’t enough space on a drive. Hmm. Maybe. So I did a custom job with few files to backup plus the image. Same outcome. And tons of space left on the external drive. Got on the internet and discovered the “drive” is in fact a reserved system partition and I am maybe 35 MB short to complete.
What to do? Got the files to show and mapped the partition to a drive letter. I chopped 50 MB off the primary, boot, partition. But I have been unable to extend the reserved drive/partition to include the extra 50 MB.
Ideas? Should I give up on Win7 Images?

Yes. Sorry. SIW works well — I also discovered that CCleaner does a good job too. Thanks!!!

Curiouser and curiouser. On both IE and CHROME I am now unable to download. I use Zone Alarm Extreme but have made no changes to it recently. I do not use MSE. I have run CCLeaner and Malwarebytes without any bad results. After this behavior started I did run Windows Defender offline beta, it took 4 DAYS to run, indicated it had found some suspicious things but when I hit the continue button it curled up anhd disappeared. I’ve checked for logs or anything else but have found nothing. The MS site is clueless. So, what could affect both browsers and, perhaps, eat the Defender results? Or do we have two mysteries?

I’m one of the unfortunate who got phished on an account at Yahoo. My problem is that I cannot log in to YAHOO now. I’ve tried every possible way and cannot find a means of actually getting to a person. The real hangup seems to be that the challenge may have been changed. Since I cannot get the challenge to work, I cannot get in. Does anyone have any idea how to get to a live person in support at Yahoo. The Security Center has no links except for one which sends you right back to entering the YAHOO ID and then the challenge.
By the way, I am right now changing the e-mail in my profile here!

I’ll give the CHROME re-install a try. Thanks